Banking, Finance & Services

Hedge funds were just handed an opportunity to make even more money under a new law signed by President Barack Obama last month. Consumer advocates say that unsophisticated investors may be at risk as a result. Read More

Dalla Al Baraka, a major Saudi conglomerate, has acquired two million acres of farmland in eastern Sudan, to produce food for export. While the investors are hoping to wean Saudi Arabia off imports from South America, such agreements have also caused concern among local Sudanese farmers. Read More

Protestors have rallied this week outside annual meetings of Barclays bank in London, Citibank in Dallas, Credit Suisse in Zurich and Wells Fargo in San Francisco. A surprising number of shareholders have rallied to their side to vote down excessive executive compensation, in an unexpected victory for the Occupy movement. Read More

Eduardo Castro-Wright, the former CEO of Walmart Stores USA, has been accused of orchestrating a $24 million bribery scheme to expand the company's presence in Mexico between 2002 and 2005. The alleged scheme involved a series of payoffs to Mexican city governments, according to an investigation by the New York Times Read More

Goldman Sachs will pay out $22 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle charges of insider trading. Company researchers were accused of holding weekly "huddles" with investment bankers and traders to provide them with stock tips for preferred clients. Read More

Three Barclays bankers made more than $15 million in 2011 salary packages, with the CEO making $28 million. The numbers were revealed under a pact made by the banking sector with the UK government, under Project Merlin, sparking outrage. Read More

Greg Smith, a Goldman Sachs employee in London, has quit the company with a fiercely critical op-ed in the New York Times in which he accuses the Wall Street investment bank of losing its moral compass. Read More

Two Spanish lawyers have launched a campaign on social networking sites to prise out information about Euribor, the reference interest rate used for calculating mortgage payments in Spain, and to draw attention to the lack of transparency surrounding the way the rate is set. Read More

During the final, desperate days before it entered bankruptcy proceedings, MF Global executives took money from segregated customer accounts - money that belonged not to MF Global but to the farmers and commodities traders that were its clients - and used it to prop up its rapidly collapsing business. Nor was this petty cash: of the $6.9 billion in customer assets that MF Global held, a stunning $1.6 billion is missing. There is virtually no chance that the full amount will ever be recovered. Read More

Mahmoud Karzai, brother to the Afghan president and Abdul Hasin Fahim, brother to the vice-president, are the real symbols of corruption in Afghanistan. Kabul Bank has helped finance their shady deals and contracts with the U.S. military Read More